Here’s some murderous rage from Forbes contributor Steve Zwick, who is scouting out lamp-posts for those who refuse to fall in line with his views on anthropogenic global warming:
We know who the active denialists are — not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.
They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?
“They broke the climate”. (Pretty impressive, actually: who knew that a few dissenting voices could wield such Godlike power?)
String ’em up!
Before he does anything rash, Mr Zwick might want to have a chat with James Lovelock, who now says that all that early hysteria might have been, well, a little overheated.
8 Comments
We can all be pleased that James Lovelock has modified his earlier, overheated opinion.
But it’s easy to understand that those who believe in science – including Steve Zwick, obviously – could be upset about the politicization of this “debate”, which it seems was the thrust of his tirade.
Google, page 1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming_2.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=more-proof-of-global-warm
What’s the contrary argument and who’s backing it up?
Uhmmm, Churchgoer?
Your lead link – Wikipedia I note. Completely credible one would of course “Believe.” (I would ask, the difference betwixt “Believe and Faith” but I ‘spect there’s too easy an answer for that.)
Le’see how the fine folks of Wiki distinguish. Uhmmm, hate to put a Leftie on Malcolm’s Waka but:
“Wikipedia is not ‘truth,’ Wikipedia is ‘verifiability’ of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.”
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
Ol’ JK stumbled upon something after Malcolm’s ‘Tower Of Babel’ post and it seemed like… well, it read something like “going to church.”
Here’s a sample.
It shouldn’t take long to find plenty more if you Google around a bit, though you are less likely to run across any of it in the MSM.
Our own posts on this topic are here. My position, simply put, is that A) yes, the world may indeed be warming, as it has always done from time to time; B) if it is in fact warming, human activity may be indeed be part of the reason why; C) that a warmer world may or may not be preferable to the one we currently inhabit (though on a personal level I do hate hot weather); D) that it may or may not be possible for us to do anything about it should we decide it’s worth it to try; and E) that there are clearly a great many parties, with all sorts of vested interests, who stand to reap enormous benefits by manipulating the flow of money and political power in order to address this “crisis” — and so skepticism is a reasonable and healthy posture.
I see I came to the table late on this one, but a few parting points if I may:
Why rely on a science article in the WSJ over those in Scientific American, National Geographic, by NASA and 90%+ of published scientific opinion on the subject? If we like, we can poke around on the internet and find dissenting viewpoint on any subject, but to what end?
Why object to those who might profit from attempting to address the problem and not to those currently profiting by not addressing the problem?
First, it is not a question of “accepting” the evidence on climate change. The science on these issues have a long history of being wrong, as science often is; there is nothing exceptional about that. Yet only in the environment-related fields are they seldom held accountable. My favorite example of this is Paul Erhlich. “The Population Bomb” is a tissue of nonsense from cover to cover; virtually every prediction has been shown to be false; the author should turn red with embarrasment when sections are quoted back at him. Yet Erlich’s later books are all over-praised, and he is even credited on some blurbs as being the man who brought the “population crisis” to the forefront.
Tim Blair, on his blog, has a little cottage industry going in which he points out the demonstrably false predictions made by gloabl warming activist Tim Flannery, yet Flannery continues to receive (Australian) government grants and government positions. It is almost as though wrong-headedness on environment-related issues is encouraged as long as it causes the proper alarm.
Second, much of what passes for environmental discussions does not concern the environment at all. It concerns the economy. We see this in cap and trade, emissions trading, carbon taxes, the ridiculous buy-local movement, and so on. Why in the world should we take a climatologists view on such matters? The issue is resource allocation and resource exploitation. That is best done in a free market. All of history proves that.
Right, Dom.
Churchgoer, if it were just a matter of “who profits” in a free market, then by all means, let the various interests slug it out.
But what we have here is an effort to commandeer and control the marketplace itself, at a global level, while subordinating the sovereignty of nations to the authority of an unelected, activist clique of bureaucrats and academics, many of whom have clear conflicts of interest.
Given all that, and especially in light of the uncertainty of climate forecasting (as witness Dr. Lovelock’s retreat from his sky-is-falling predictions of just a few years ago), then a little wariness seems not unwise, I think.
Yeah, what Dom says.
As for Churchy (LaFemme?), where warmalism is concerned, scientific opinion is equal parts oxymoronic and plain-vanilla moronic.
And, like clock work, here he is again. The expert. At no point in this article are we told that virtually all of his previous books on these matters are not fit to line a bird cage:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich?intcmp=239